Hinko Smrekar was a versatile, independent,
free-thinking and socially engaged artist. Because of this, he was repeatedly
indicted and imprisoned, and then shot as a hostage in 1942. He spoke a number
of foreign languages and used them to caption his works to make them more
widely comprehensible. His rich, fantastic, and strong style cannot be put into
any of the artistic movements of the time. He followed domestic and foreign
socio-political events and was up to date on both global processes and the
local crime section. Everything he saw and felt, whatever moved and shocked him
took shape in his drawings. With extraordinary precision, he drew attention to
what we recognise as the permanent failings of the human character, making his
images timeless. Admirable are his courage, openness and honesty, with which he
gained not only artistic but also historical legitimacy to portray his era and
its people.
In order to get through, Smrekar took on any
job – illustrating books for different target audiences, making honorary
diplomas, advertisements, ex libris, drawing caricatures and socio-political
satires, drawing ethnographic and fairy-tale motifs, and scenes from folk
superstition and folk tales. He was a self-taught man who perfected the drawing
technique so that his works depicting a multitude of people still retain
harmony with the rules of anatomy, perspective and composition, and also amaze
the viewer with their immediacy and sincerity. His speciality was pen-drawing –
washed, water-coloured or combined with pastels, while his prints – woodcuts,
etchings, and aquatints, make him one of the best printmakers of this era. In
later years, he started painting in oil, and around 1940, also to sculpt.
Due to the scope of Smrekar’s body of work and
the sensitivity of the material (the exhibition is mostly made up of works on
paper, which according to museum standards can only be exhibited for three
months at a time), the exhibition is divided into two parts.
Part 1: 8 July – 3 October, 2021
The exhibition covers the period between 1902
and 1917. It includes illustrated postcards from his study years and the time
of the Vesna Art Club, and illustrations for the books by Ivan Cankar, under
whose influence Smrekar began to develop a sharply critical tone, which he then
continued in caricatures. During these years, he drew more than fifty self-caricatures
and caricatures of contemporaries, motifs for Slavic Playing Cards and Slavic
Tarock Cards, drawings with ethnographic motifs taken from Slovene folk
songs, socio-political satire and caricatures that mostly deal with the
attitude of petit-bourgeoisie society towards the arts and artists, a series of
postcards War in Pictures, drawings
of larger formats and graphic prints with fairy-tale motifs and scenes from
folk superstition and folk tales, drawings for the medical doctor Dr Franc
Derganc, drawings of his internment in Scheifling and illustrations for the
story Martin Krpan by Fran Levstik,
where he recreated the story’s proud and ironic outlook of a rural man on
imperial Vienna.
Part 2: 27 October, 2021 – 13 February, 2022
This exhibition covers the period between 1918
and 1942. During these years, Smrekar’s strong creative enthusiasm led his
across the narrow Slovenian borders into the universal, world realm. There is an
obvious turn from the artist who went abroad full of ideals and youthful
enthusiasm, to the one who became increasingly bitter over the years and saw
deformity all around him. Therefore, we should not be surprised that he became
such a caricaturist and an almost absolute cynic, like all defeated, doubting
idealists.
Numerous self-caricatures and caricatures of his
contemporaries, loving portraits of his mother, socio-political satires and
illustrations for various publications and books, fairy-tale scenes with
dwarves and elves and humorous mountaineering scenes were followed by two
cycles that are true prophetic visions – the graphic cycle The Seven Deadly Sins and a cycle of larger drawings Mirror of the World; in both he strongly
condemned society and individuals living in it, especially their morals and the
disorderly, confusing social conditions. Shocking drawings of the mentally unwell,
sketches for the competition to decorate the grand hallway of the Banovina
Palace, oil paintings and sculptures in baked clay were followed by
illustrations for Andersen's fairy tales. He also drew attention to the ascending
Nazism in a series of political caricatures depicting Stalin and his generals,
Churchill, Roosevelt, and others.
Author of the exhibition
Alenka Simončič
Associates
Tina Buh, Mateja Krapež, Michel Mohor
Conservation-restoration works
Tina Buh
Visual and graphic design
Ranko Novak
Works of art loaned by
Festival Velenje – Velenje Gallery
Miran Jarc Library, Novo mesto
Škofja Loka Museum
Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana
National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia
National Gallery of Slovenia
National and University Library, Ljubljana
National Museum of Slovenia
Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences
Slovenian Theatre Institute
private collectors
The exhibition was supported by